Geek - some speculations about Linux & FOSS

So, if you follow these things, Oracle has launched "Unbreakable Linux". What
it has done is download all the sources that RH makes publically available for
RHEL, gone through them & removed all the RH trademarks, and recompiled
it, to producea binary-compatible distro with the names and serial numbers
filed off. This is nothing new; several projects have already done this, of which
CentOS is the best known.

I must admit that RH's movements a couple of years back rather mystified me -
killing off the free product, offering a sort of rolling testbed instead in the form
of Fedora, and demanding $LOTS for all versions of RHEL, but hey, it seems to
be working for them. I half-suspect that Oracle's mucking about with
Oracle Linux is more of a warning shot across RH's bows than anything
else.

But saying that, and even allowing for the fact that ultimately the whole
model of corporates making money from FOSS &c is all new and unproven, I
don't have a lot of faith in the ways that either RH or SuSE are doing it.

I think that I grok why and how and what Canonical and Ubuntu are doing,
but that's one rich man's fiat, really. It's different.

But one thing, I suspect, is relatively certain. There's a lot of
consolidation yet to happen in the FOSS world. Some of that will come from
M&A activity, some will be companies simply going out of business.

My guesses?
( Lots of informed speculation on the future of OSs, Unix and FOSS... )